African socialism

African socialism, socialist doctrines adopted by several African leaders at the close of French and British colonial rule during the 1950s and ’60s.

(Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)

As African countries gained independence, anticolonial nationalism could no longer play the unifying and mobilizing role that it had in the early 1950s. African socialism became a mobilizing slogan to unite Africans around the challenge of economic development in their postcolonial societies. The communal basis of most African precolonial societies and the absence of a tradition of private property appeared to justify the existence of an indigenous African path to socialism, one that seemingly offered a third way between Western capitalism and Soviet communism.

Unlike Marxism, a historical-materialist method based on a well-established body of theoretical literature, African socialism emerged rapidly as an eclectic and pragmatic approach to development. Its best-known proponents included Léopold Senghor and Mamadou Dia of Senegal, Sékou Touré of Guinea, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Tom Mboya of Kenya, and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.

The Colloquium on Policies of Development and African Approaches to Socialism, a conference of African leaders held in Dakar, Senegal, in 1962, failed to produce a clear definition or a unified vision of African socialism. The diverse participants interpreted African socialism to reflect the varied needs of their respective countries. They generally agreed, however, that precolonial Africa’s communal values and the relative absence of classes and class struggle should form the basis of an African path of development. Three main themes were emphasized: African identity, economic development, and class formation and social control.

Senghor, probably the first to use the term African socialism, argued that Western and Soviet materialism should be replaced with values rooted in the continent’s precolonial collective tradition. African socialism should draw on Negritude, the celebration of black culture and the African personality. Dia saw African socialism as a synthesis of individualist and socialist values, producing a humanist outlook that would accord with Christian and Muslim beliefs and allow Africa to follow its own trajectory, independent of the West and the Soviet bloc. For the Pan-Africanist George Padmore, African socialism was part of a threefold revolutionary movement encompassing national self-determination, social revolution, and continental unity. African socialism should begin with communal land ownership and cooperative agriculture, along with joint state and private initiatives to build the economy. The leadership’s task was to unite all sections of society behind those development goals.

Despite the belief that African socialism was rooted in the continent’s precolonial tradition, the approach was applied to societies that had been markedly transformed by the colonial experience in varied ways, making the implementation of a single doctrine problematic. Ghana, for example, became a beacon for Pan-African unity and African socialism upon gaining its independence in 1957. However, unlike most proponents of African socialism, who gave primacy to rural development, Nkrumah stressed the large-scale development of energy resources as a means of rapid industrialization. Ghana quickly became heavily indebted, and Nkrumah became increasingly intolerant of criticism. In 1964 he declared himself to be president for life and banned opposition parties. He was overthrown in 1966.

Guinea became independent in far more difficult conditions. Once it accepted France’s offer of independence in 1958, it faced the complete withdrawal of the French colonial apparatus and civil service. Guinea’s African socialism was premised on the development of state-run mechanized farms and market controls. But Guinea lacked the educated personnel for state-led development; at independence it had fewer than 50 university graduates, a legacy of colonial policy. Its state farms foundered, and price controls alienated peasants and traders, who smuggled produce into neighbouring countries to obtain higher prices for their goods. As social discontent mounted, Touré’s rule became increasingly centralized and authoritarian. He remained in power until his death in 1984.

In contrast to Nkrumah’s emphasis on state-led development projects, Nyerere, the doctrine’s best-known East African advocate, stressed village-level development. But Nyerere shared Nkrumah’s belief in a one-party state, arguing that class divisions were foreign to Africa, that their development should be suppressed, and that social differences could be reconciled within a single party. Capitalism was premised on exploitation and Marxism on class conflict, Nyerere contended. Socialist and democratic values were part of Africa’s precolonial history, reflecting a time when all members of society contributed to production and wealth was distributed equitably.

As leader of Tanzania (formed in 1964 through the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar), Nyerere promoted the idea of ujamaa (Swahili: “familyhood”), in which the extended family was the building block of African development. Nyerere’s 1967 Arusha Declaration stressed ujamaa, self-reliance, and austerity as the key planks of African socialism. Nyerere launched a program of villagization—the forced relocation of rural people into collective and cooperative villages—as the basis for economic development. But the initiative proved politically unpopular and economically nonviable. Once again, the peasants resisted the state’s external interventions.

Abdul Rahman Mohammed Babu, an influential critic of Nyerere, was imprisoned by Nyerere between 1972 and 1978. In prison he wrote a significant appraisal of African socialism that was smuggled out of the country and later published as African Socialism or Socialist Africa? Babu contended that African socialists, like other African leaders, had pursued export-oriented strategies that perpetuated Africa’s dependency on foreign investment and foreign aid. He called for working-class organization and for the development of Africa’s productive forces.

Babu’s critique signalled the intellectual demise of African socialism, but the doctrine’s practical end was already evident in its failed economic projects and the repressive one-party regimes wielding power in its name. Once in authority, African socialists proved no more democratic than their conservative counterparts.

African socialism should be distinguished from a later wave of attempts to apply Marxist-Leninist principles to African development, known as Afrocommunism, which asserted the salience of class struggle and closer alignment with the Soviet bloc.